Over the last few months, I’ve become very keen on whittling down my writing. I’ve thought about Samuel Delany’s About Writing for about a year now; and the lesson that has become most valuable to me is an unglamorous one. To the writer whose metaphors are evocative but cluttered, Delany advises: “Try the passage without it.” I’ve been pushing myself to achieve more cutthroat concision, to kill my babies indiscriminately without concern for the loss of precious phrases. Whatever does not work, I remove and I do not replace it. I dismember sentences with a handy period. I don’t mean to sound ascetic but I crave clarity, which is in some ways a great relief.
From Brecht:
AND I ALWAYS THOUGHT
And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.
Movies:
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973): We found an abandoned Criterion Collection blu-ray copy of Badlands in a cardboard box. The encounter was an appropriate prologue to the film, one of the few by Malick that I hadn’t yet seen. The palette of Badlands refracts the primary colours of billboards and magazines onto green grass, red skies, and blue jeans, a bleeding saturation. American pop culture nips at and agitates the mind’s insecurities. The childish adult takes advantage of the rightless child taught to earn respect in this world by playing adult. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) seduces the titular girl (Sue Lyon) by indulging her desire to be seen as a glamorous starlet. Kubrick’s selection of details—Lolita’s open-mouthed chewing of potato chips, her painted-on makeup and puffy hair—suggests that this costume only convinces those who want to be convinced.
In Badlands, Kit (Martin Sheen) looks like James Dean. For this reason, he gets what he wants with little resistance, whether from the cops or from Holly (Sissy Spacek), the 15-year-old who he’s whisked away from her school and family. She insists it’s love, then admits it probably is not. The movie magazine says Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth are in love, too…but not with each other. On the road, she contemplates what else it is that she loves. She learns to listen to her contradictions, discovers how to choose her yes’s and no’s. However charming Kit may be, his seduction pales in comparison to these secret whispers.
Pollock (Ed Harris, 2000): Impressive, in that Harris directs himself in a 10-year project initially approached because of a remark Harris’ father made about he and Pollock’s resemblance. Even more impressive for the reproductions of Pollock’s paintings that Harris painted himself. With each viewing of Pollock, however, I become more attached to Marcia Gay Harden’s Lee Krasner, the abstract expressionist painter known by many as Pollock’s wife. Tough as nails and wholly committed to her craft, Krasner separates Pollock the brilliant artist from her volatile husband Jackson. To the press and at gallery shows, she refers to him by his last name. (Jeffrey Tambor’s Clement Greenberg does the same, implying that this choice was necessary for anyone who wished to tolerate him.)
Krasner’s support for Pollock outweighs any interpersonal feelings for Jackson. Her true love is art, abstract expressionism. What she hopes is that Jackson will not ruin Pollock, for the sake of history. To accomplish this however she usually has no choice but to be his mother. He demands that they have kids, she refuses, arguing that they are artists. The hidden reason is that she has already dedicated so much of herself to raising him. In their early years together, Harris depicts Krasner standing by Pollock’s canvas to critique him. She asks him why this stroke or that smear, why he only follows intuition with no theoretical backbone. Harris makes explicit that Pollock’s artistic breakthrough only arrives after he can answer these important questions. But repeatedly he alienates his friends, he cheats, he blames his wife for their childlessness. His lethargic refusal of new ideas points to a deep-rooted self-sabotage against all efforts to sustain him.
A small note: In “Festivals, Markets, Critics”, Daryl Chin describes Robert De Niro’s failed attempt to adapt Pollock’s life in 1992: “Not just gossip columnists, but critics and film industry executives thought that De Niro's plans for the film were preposterous, because of the assumption that De Niro's background is identical with Martin Scorsese.” Chin points out that in fact De Niro, who’d been raised by the 1950s New York City arts scene, had actually met Pollock in person. (Compare this to Basquiat director Julian Schnabel: According to Jim Jarmusch, “Jean-Michel was not a fan of Schnabel as a person back then.”) De Niro had proposed casting Barbra Streisand as Lee Krasner. Of course Harris’ Pollock is impressive, impressive, impressive. But…
Books:
Berserk by Kentaro Miura: The late Miura cited M.C. Escher, H.R. Giger, and Hieronymus Bosch as his major influences. These are obvious from the mathematical mazes and phallic creatures that populate the panels. The bodies of Berserk’s graphic subject matter (sexual assault, genocide, to name a few) move in circular stretches, reaching out to the reader in pain. They recall images of Greek mythology. (Titian’s “Rape of Europa,” Francesco Primaticcio’s “Rape of Helene”, you get the idea.) But beyond the stirring tonal nuances and dignifying details of these drawings, Berserk’s convoluted writing is frequently overloaded with sillier deviations. It is weighed down in particular by the patronizing assumption that survival always builds character. Without any narrative depth (visually, there certainly is), this is little more than an excuse for the sheer amount of sexual violence that occurs.
I’ve also been reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Samuel Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast. Two autobiographies about being a novelist (Hemingway in Paris and Delany in New York City). Cooking efficiently and creatively, with the occasional splurge on expensive food and drink; walking around the city and thinking (or arguing) about art; and separating joy from various forms of private ownership. I was very happy to find that my used copy of Heavenly Breakfast has Delany’s autograph in it. This discovery was the starting point of my summer.
Other books on the shelf… John Cassavetes: Interviews, Sexual Hegemony, Clement Greenberg Late Writings.
Recent updates:
I have a website now.
Isiah Medina and I interviewed Isaac Goes, whose new film Worlds (a co-production by Kinet Media and Quantity Cinema, and produced by Isiah Medina) is now available to watch and to download. I maintain that the film is a perfect one. Trust that this is not hyperbole but in reference to how the film is perfectly self-contained, which makes it feel breezy, light, despite the exhaustive computations done behind-the-scenes. Without conjecture, Goes executes a test of his hypothesis—of infinite worlds that we ourselves generate through continual cognition. When watching a film we always partake in the cognitive process of seeking, sifting, sorting, assigning. In Worlds, this procedure is prismatic. We see sounds and hear images. A group of filmmakers film each other, collecting footage for their own films. Each line of vision is different from the others. Frames are scanned, files are rearranged atop scenes of nature. This filmic game invokes the intellectual relaxation of a hidden object game, the puzzles of an I Spy book, returning a library book to its shelf, organizing a hard drive—for this reason its universal pleasures seem boundless whether watched alone or in a group.
Isaac Goes, Worlds, 2021.